TIC AND JOB CREATION FOR WOMEN IN ECOWAS

The main objective of this dissertation is to analyze the effect of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on job creation for women in the ECOWAS region. More specifically, we first studied the effect of cell phone subscriptions on women's employment in ECOWAS, and then measured the effect of Internet use on women's employment in the zone. To do this, we used a panel model with a system GMM estimation method for a sample of 15 ECOWAS countries over the period from 2008 to 2018. The empirical results show that cell phone subscriptions and internet use favor women's employment in ECOWAS. This implies that the rise of mobile telephony over the past decade has favored female job creation in the zone. We then delineated a frontier in terms of the number of cell phone subscriptions, and found that the effect of cell phone subscription is not significant above the frontier (6022421.627), but is significant below it.